studio1.1 at SLUICE BIENNIAL presents KATE LYDDON and JOHN SUMMERS

About

We have worked with Kate Lyddon and John Summers for almost the entire life of studio1.1 and are proud to present them at Sluice Biennial 2017. This is the first time they have been shown together. A pairing that delighted both them and us.

There is little sugar and spice in Lyddon's work, nor are slugs and snails notably present in Summers' as the binary blah of gender specificity falls on stony ground. 

Summers' sculptures can be said to embody the performance of their making, casts thrown from the body like crutches from the cured of Lourdes. What's there collides with our sense of what's not there, whatever's been discarded somewhere along the way. These pure plaster scraps of anatomy, mixed in with random materials, embedded in senseless-seeming towers of industrial junk, push the familiar way beyond the material world of their origins.   

Lyddon's work is by contrast a reflective critique of image and standing, a satirical take on a life that is no less real for being riotously staged. Straight from the world of Grimm or Revelation, these shapes are recognisable as bodies, but, often bloated, hideously deformed, they float into our consciousness and stick there. Like, for example, flies on a fly-paper.

From reality to the imaginary or from the imaginary to the real, Summers and Lyddon start from opposite ends, but the deformation that arises in that translation is the key to both.

Both work to dissect the carnival of souls. Starting from different points along the funhouse spectrum, they rachet up the delirium to a point where it's a relief they don't have sound. It would be Pandemonium.

Art takes a lot of faith. You gotta have faith.